Brisingr (Inheritance, Book 3)

it is a good continuation to the other books. its only problem is that it is not the last book.

I think reading the reviews of Brisingr is better than slogging through the book! I loved reading the *spoilers* and am very happy to save money by not buying the book! Many of the reviews were a hoot!
Let's predict what will happen in Book 4: Eragon goes off with Arya to some eternal life Elf Land; Murtagh will come out from the evil spell Galbatorix put on him and he will once again be 'good' and marry Nasuada.
Maybe Roran will have to be King.
There, now I don't care how long it takes Paolini to write the 4th book.

Compared to P's last 2 books this one is a great improvement. A lot of the boring junk has been slimmed down. Although it could use more fight scenes the ones it does have are great. I'm kind of disappointed in the ending, it really was not what i thought it was going to be but it was still good.

If you've read his last two books you should read this one.

I can't wait to read his next book just so i can see how much his story telling and writing skills have improved

I read the author's notes at the back of the book before I started and that's where I learned that this book would have been much longer had not an editor worked with Paolini to trim it down.

Time to fire that editor and hire one who will actually do the job.

Paolini's writing and the attendant lack of a competent editor remind me of what happened with Tom Clancy's books: A halfway decent story gets buried in all sorts of bad writing. If it's not the minutiae of how a sword is made (reminded me of one of Clancy's little side-trips in how to make a submarine quiet), it's the endless repetition of information that has already been introduced and death-by-hackneyed-phrases. Really, a simple search and delete of the overused phrase "waking dream" and oft-repeated references to the trial of long blades will likely reduce this book by about 50 pages. Then cut out the gratuitous meandering into useless subplots (such as the cult execution scene at the beginning, dwarf politics, Roran's integration into the Varden warriers, three paragraphs of description every time Saphira needs to poke her head into something small) and Paolini could have hit the salient plot points *and* finished this epic all within 350 pages.

It's a ponderously long and winded tale that doesn't add significantly to what was already known, and then snatches away the payoff by needing another 700-page tome to finish the tale. None of this would be as bothersome if the writing were actually good.

When I first read Eragon and criticized it for these same failings, my friends said, "He's a young author and this is a great achievement for someone in his teens." OK, I'll buy that. But it's been six years since Eragon was published. One would think the boy wonder had actually learned better writing and story telling skills in the intervening years. If nothing else, some one at Knopf should have assigned a competent editor to rein in the ceaseless blather.

very disappointed in this rambling story line intended only to prolong the money making interests of the author and publisher..... by having a 4th book appear. When this first series started, this was to be a trilogy...and could have been finished as such...3 books...but greed got in the way...to bad the first 2 books were excellent...this one "stunk"